International Encyclopedia of Public Policy and Administration - Vol. 2

To conclude, the first of two phases of progress have
been achieved by India's bureaucracy in its transition from
governance to administration in the past 50 years. Today, it
stands poised at the threshold of a new breakthrough in its
transition from administration to management.

Rowat, D. C., 1990, "Comparing Bureaucracies in Developing
and Developed Countries". International Review of Administration Science.

INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, HABITAT. The
special immediate relationships that link small-scale traditional societies with their habitats and their uses of natural
resources, which form the basis for native title- and landrights policies in a number of settler countries.

The term, indigenous people, is rightly applied to any
who have established a particular country as their home
and who were born there. It has, however, been given a
more specific political meaning; that is, that part of a country's population that has been there beyond the memory
of humans; who are members (and/or their descendants)
of small-scale, low-energy societies that live, or once lived,
by hunting and gathering, horticulture, or pastoralism, and
whose present cultural meanings and values are directly
oriented toward that tradition.

These modes of subsistence connect peoples to their
respective habitats with obvious immediacy. The technologies of foragers and low-energy farmers do not enable them
to manipulate the productivity of their habitats to any
great extent, contrasted with, for instance, high-energy
farmers who use irrigation, mechanical tillage and cultivation, and radical change in the genetics of crops and livestock. Instead, those termed "indigenous" peoples developed profound knowledge of the patterns of nature and its
effects on the productivity of the local flora and fauna.
They used their mobility, low population densities, and
generalized, rather than specialized, technology to enable
them to follow opportunistic strategies of utilizing the resources until the resources' abundance passed, when they
were able to change to other strategies.

The connection between indigenous peoples and their
habitats should not be seen in the simplistic terms of
Marxian economic determinism. Their knowledge of, and
their strategies for exploiting, resources developed and was
maintained in the contexts of belief systems and forms of
social organization that led to a much more intimate connection, in which land and natural resources were accorded
meanings that far transcended bare utilitarian values. The
connection between the habitats and their resources, and
the purpose and ways of life of indigenous peoples is complex and closely knit. Disruption of any part of that intricate web has consequences far more damaging than merely
changing the way in which women and men get their daily
bread.

Although not isolated, these societies were politically
autonomous, or nearly so, with their own economies and
cultures, including languages. Overtaken by the sequence
of colonial conquest of their homelands, followed by the
local development of the nation-state, they are now dispossessed, disadvantaged ethnic minorities, sometimes derided for what is perceived as their primitive technology
(often rationalized-quite falsely-as indicative of moral
and mental backwardness) by the dominant society of
which they have involuntarily become part.

Modern nation-states must necessarily participate and
integrate themselves in the world market economy, which
entails a view and use of natural resources that is consonant with that of Western industrialized economies. The
need for profit is inherent in economic endeavor in the
market economy. Continuing profit requires improving efficiency and productivity, usually only feasible at a limited
number of critical junctures in the operations. To this end,
industrialized economies increasingly develop and use
technology to enable them to move away from labor-intensive operations toward greater use of capital in the form
of impersonal equipment and information. A consequence
has been a steady decrement in the perceived significance
of social relationships in economic operations. The former
are now seen as no more than peripherals to the economy.
This is demonstrated by the extreme difficulty and small
success that sociologists and economists have had in meaningfully relating their respective concepts and data to each
other's frames of reference, and in sensibly integrating each
other's data. The dislocation of the economic from the social is further illustrated by the lack of success in applying
ethical principles to the applications of technology and
other economic operations. There is also no clear vision of
how to reconcile conservation imperatives with the de-

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